With April and the end of the school year fast approaching, the speaker for this year’s graduation has been announced. NBC’s Lester Holt will be speaking to Pepperdine graduates on April 28.
Holt is currently the weekend anchor for “NBC Nightly News,” and is also the co-anchor of the weekend edition of “Today.”
In September 2011, Holt was named principal anchor of “Dateline NBC.” In addition to also contributing to MSNBC, Holt works as a fill-in anchor and correspondent for “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” and the weekday “Today” program, according to MSNBC.
Before joining the NBC News network in 2000, Holt anchored the evening news for WBBM-TV in Chicago, for 14 years. As U.S. forces prepared in Kuwait to launch their invasion of Iraq In 2003, Holt was there reporting from the border. Holt covered both hurricanes Katrina and Rita from the Gulf Coast in 2005, and in 2006, he reported from the front lines in Lebanon on the war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Early in 2010, Holt traveled to Haiti and covered the immediate aftermath and international response to the destruction caused by the January earthquake. Holt was also one of the earliest reporters to cover the 2010 disastrous oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
Last year, he reported from the streets of Cairo on the political and civil unrest in Egypt, and in March 2011, Holt also traveled overseas to report on the Japanese earthquake and resulting nuclear crisis.
Holt contributed to the CBS News broadcast “48 Hours,” and his work on “48 Hours: No Place Like Home,” earned him a 1990 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award. Holt was also part of the “Today” anchor team that won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Morning Program in 2010.
Holt’s son, Stefan, graduated from Pepperdine in 2009 and also works as a broadcast journalist.
